


[s] dirk: depone.

by onlyeli



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Character Study, Dirk Strider Recovering, Earth C (Homestuck), In his own unique way, NOT!!! COMPLIANT, Not Canon Compliant - Homestuck 2: Beyond Canon, Not Canon Compliant - The Homestuck Epilogues, Not Epilogue Compliant, Other, POV Dirk Strider, Post-Canon, Pretentious, Socratic Dialogue, Written in the Style of Dirk Strider kind of, dirk: i will write my own character study, just two dirks being dirks, ultimate dirk is thankfully NOT in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-01
Updated: 2020-06-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:00:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24490936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onlyeli/pseuds/onlyeli
Summary: FICTIONAL DIRK: For the sake of brevity, I won't pull out the obvious “says you”. I'll bet you're real mad that this is a dialogue now. You were just itching to do some Lovecrafian shit to the literal horizon in an effort to shoehorn that metaphor in, weren't you?DIRK: You make fun of me for being “surprisingly woke” and then drop the L-bomb like that? Dude.FICTIONAL DIRK: Let it be known I’m shrugging.FICTIONAL DIRK: You didn’t do all of this just to have a debate on ‘art vs artist’, did you?
Relationships: Dirk Strider & Himself, Dirk Strider & His Splinters, Jake English/Dirk Strider, Roxy Lalonde & Dirk Strider
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	[s] dirk: depone.

The boy sits on a smooth rock at midnight. The moon is already full and large, tossed over the sea before him as though it were buoyant. It slips beneath every new wave that crests along the shore, and only when they settle does he see it in full again. The moment is fleeting, the luminescence it provides even more so. It looks like drowning. For a moment, he wonders if it could be asking for his help, and then he shuts that shit down. The narration is hardly a paragraph in. He can wait. 

The moon is, in fact, doing just fine, considering it is in space and not, in fact, the water, like he’d tried to convince us all back there. Us being the audience, the spectator to his one-man shitshow. The boy picks up a stone from the sand by his feet and dashes it into the tumultuous water. 

“This was supposed to be about me, wasn’t it?” He says, squinting against the absence of light behind his overzealous and, it has to be said, incredibly stylish shades. “I can say whatever the fuck I like. If I want to paint the moon as a man torn asunder by the waves, I can.”

Around him, the night air is still and quiet. Probably silently judging him for being a sexist piece of shit. The moon is a woman, dumbass. Everyone knows that.

“You’re the dumbass,” says the boy, who had figured, naively, he’d needed no fanfare upon his introduction. His name is Dirk Strider, and he is rolling his eyes. “Wouldn’t it be shittier of me to immediately assume that the moon, who in this scenario is in danger, is a woman in need of my help?”

He says this as if he were going to help.

He says this as if he were not, by virtue of assuming a celestial body were close to death instead of a human body (and isn’t that funny? A celestial body. A human body. A body of water. We’ll come back to that), excusing himself from providing assistance entirely. He allows himself to speculate on the nature of assistance instead. He makes himself incompetent on purpouse.

“So both parties are helpless, then.”

It isn’t a dialogue yet, smart guy. Go back to staring at the ocean.

Dirk Strider stares at the ocean. The waves aren’t glassy enough to skim rocks on, but he picks up another eroded stone anyway and flicks it into the water. It’s swallowed by the waves, unlike the moon, which is still doing fine. The night is cloudless, pristine in a way that seems artificial. It’s easier for him if he imagines his surroundings as a still factor, a painting. Oil on canvas has no bearing on his physical form. The illusion, though, has no permanence - if it were an illustration, the remnants of the stone wouldn’t linger on his fingers. The stone wouldn’t have been eroded at all. Time passes, here. He closes his hand in a loose fist and rolls the gravel along his skin, quiet in his consideration.

“Alright,” he says. “We get it. The night is quiet, I’m quiet. This isn’t going to be much of an epic if everyone waits around being quiet.”

No one said this was going to be an epic. It’s rather presumptuous of him to call it that, actually. Rather indicative of his nature.

“So that’s what this is about. My nature.” 

Stop trying to turn this into a fucking dialogue. We’ll get to that. The narration isn’t done with its symbolism yet.

He is alone. This is not unusual. Dirk Strider has oftentimes found himself alone with the ocean. The sound of the waves brings him a strange sense of familiarity. There is home here as much as there is isolation. 

He has come here to think. 

“About what?” He asks to the air. The wind has no answer for him. He scoffs. “Maybe not. But you do.”

His conviction is immense. Clearly, he believes that the narration can solve his problems for him. His belief in this is so strong, in fact, that he waits for another leading sentence to inspire his own. 

“I don’t want anyone to solve my problems for me,” he says, like a liar. “Don’t think I’m the only one that can be berated by this format, either. You’re only so eager to prevent the inevitable dialogue because then we’re on equal ground. Also, stop starting your sentences with pronouns. It’s not unique, you’re not subtly hinting at the depths of my self-centeredness. All it’s doing is making for boring reading.”

Fine. We’ll start the dialogue early. Happy now?

“Yeah. Are you going to differentiate between us?”

Obviously. We’re different people.

The smile he wears is sharp and private. “Are we?”

Yes. You are a fictionalised version of my own brain that has no bearing on the world outside of the one I have built for you. I orchestrated this beach, the stones at your feet (notice how there are three more, now?), the ocean in front of you, the sky above your head. You do not exist outside of this place.

“But in creating this place for me, you’ve given me existence to work with. Existence that doesn’t even play by the rules you’re describing. Where am I, aside from ‘a beach’? Geographically, oceans and seas aren’t interchangeable, and yet you’ve used both words to refer to the water here. The moon is both man and woman by our own interpretation. Which, may I add, is surprisingly woke for you.”

Alright, whatever. You want a special name? You got it.

FICTIONAL DIRK: Really? Couldn’t resist exerting that last little shred of authority over me, could you. Are you mad because I put you on your ass just now?  
DIRK: It wasn’t that clever. Don’t get all full of yourself because you picked out some exact wording. You aren’t a lawyer in a mediocre daytime drama.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I just think it’s an interesting distinction. You’re the Real Dirk, and you have to let me know by any means necessary - by sticking me in a nonspecific place and refusing to tell me about it, by stripping me of sight and sound, by labelling me ‘fictional’ when we both know that as soon as you sat down to write this you breathed life into me.  
DIRK: You want to talk about being stripped of your senses, of gaining knowledge? Pluck out an eye. I’m sure I can write in a well for you somewhere.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Norse mythology? That’s a break from the brand.  
DIRK: You’ve got to expand your horizons on occasion.  
DIRK: Also, there were a few too many God and god references in there to call it anything but blatant. Your subtlety could use some work.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: For the sake of brevity, I won't pull out the obvious “says you”. I'll bet you're real mad that this is a dialogue now. You were just itching to do some Lovecrafian shit to the literal horizon in an effort to shoehorn that metaphor in, weren't you?  
DIRK: You make fun of me for being “surprisingly woke” and then drop the L-bomb like that? Dude.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Let it be known I’m shrugging.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You didn’t do all of this just to have a debate on ‘art vs artist’, did you?  
DIRK: No. Though that could factor in at some stage, it wasn’t the primary objective.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Then what was?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I know you so usually don’t have an ending in mind when you start something out. It’s why you get carried away with these things. You just keep writing, keep building, because you never had a place to end up to begin with.  
DIRK: Nice.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I know.  
DIRK: You’re wrong, though. Not having a finished product to work towards, especially when building something, isn’t how I roll. Going into mechanics without an idea of where you’ll finish means you more often than not end up with jack shit.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You don’t have to put in so much effort to not use the same phrases as me. You’re the one reading this back once it’s done. Everyone else will be reading it for the first time, if you deign to show the cosmic wonders of your mind to anyone, that is. They probably won’t pick up on it.  
DIRK: A’ight.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Besides, I’m not wrong. You don’t set out with a true ending. You’re always tinkering further, adding something on. The ending you envision is never the one that sticks.  
DIRK: What does that have to do with fucking anything.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: I guess we’ll see.  
DIRK: No. That doesn’t make sense narratively. You can’t suddenly be the one who knows things after I spent time establishing I was the one calling the shots.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: ‘Spent time’? It was barely a thousand words.  
DIRK: This is getting out of hand.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Because you’re letting it, or because you were wrong, and I am now a fragment of yourself that has the capability to grow beyond you?  
DIRK: Because you’re being a dick.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: By all means, bro. Get us back on track.  
DIRK: We’ll talk about roboticism, then.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Don’t you want to break up this block of text first? Those ADHD eyes are gonna go sliding right off of this shit otherwise.

The wind picks up, just slightly. It only worsens the state of the waves, the cacophony they make as they hit the shore breaking the serenity of the night.

FICTIONAL DIRK: Oh, good. I’d almost forgotten how quiet the night was. Silence as a sound, as a shatterable object, just like the paragraph. You’re so smart.  
DIRK: We’re talking about robots now, not seeing how overtly we can be jackasses to each other.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: So talk.  
DIRK: Projects are easy.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: You’re a goddamn liar.  
DIRK: Alright, maybe it’s not the projects themselves that are easy. Maybe you made a point about getting lost in them.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: I never said lost.  
DIRK: You get your rocks off to being a pedantic shithead, or what? No, you didn't use the word lost. I did.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Isn’t that interesting.  
DIRK: Not really. People get lost in activities all the time. Reading, music, movies.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Think about him later.  
DIRK: What?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Yeah, dude, people do get lost in activities. You know what escapism is. I’m not going to hold your hand and walk you through the interactive museum of coping mechanisms. Look kiddo, there’s a special immersive room that you can sit in and watch the walls close in on you while we play recordings of your text tone from outside. If you wait long enough you might forget what your own voice sounds like. It’s a fun day for all the family, but I diverted the direction of the car at the last second and now we’re at the dentist.  
DIRK: Or the vet.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: That is an alternative punchline to that bit, yes.  
DIRK: Yes, I know what escapism is.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Glad that’s settled. But we both know that isn’t what we’re talking about.  
DIRK: No, I want to talk about escapism a little longer.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: I told you to think about him later. This part is supposed to be about you.  
DIRK: I thought you said it was about you. Your nature.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: We’re the exact same guy.  
DIRK: Ugh.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Work with me here. If we aren’t talking about escapism, the act of absorbing oneself in a situation that differs from the one in which one finds themself, what are we talking about?  
DIRK: The word ‘loss’ has a lot of meanings.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You aren’t mourning.  
DIRK: Not right now.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Stop being so difficult. I’m you.  
DIRK: It’s Germanic in origin. Related to los, which is Old Norse for breaking up the ranks of an army.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Nice callback.  
DIRK: I know. Maybe that Woden joke has legs after all.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Dirk.  
DIRK: Breaking up a battalion. It’s fitting, isn’t it? That’s what you wanted. Something that fit.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: What I want is for you to say it.  
DIRK: I lose pieces of myself to the things I work on. I break off into them.

The sea is still, now. The beach is holding its breath. The world might’ve been holding its breath, if the smug jackass on the smooth rock hadn’t made the narration spiteful with regards to the environment he existed in. Or maybe that’s cruel. Who knows. Revise this later. 

FICTIONAL DIRK: You can’t allude to breaks and all that shit every time you do that.  
DIRK: Watch me.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Carry on. We were getting somewhere.  
DIRK: When I take on something new a piece of me lodges itself in it. The piece festers there and warps the thing into something different entirely. Something that’s barely a reflection of what it was supposed to be or what is started out as.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Why aren’t you calling them splinters?  
DIRK: It feels tired and overdone.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Fair.  
DIRK: It doesn’t matter if I plan for the end or not. The part of my brain that gets stuck in the creation changes and impacts it long after I’ve finished with it.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: So you aren’t always tinkering or adding on, are you?  
DIRK: I’m repairing.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Fixing something.  
DIRK: Rescuing it from my influence.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Son of a fuck. We aren’t done with you yet. The Jake part isn’t supposed to go here.  
DIRK: How do you know? I’m the one writing this.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There’s more to get into. Keep fucking going.  
DIRK: What else is there to say? My batshit thought processes get stuck in something I care about. I don’t know if I do it on purpose somehow, because evidently leaving little remnants of myself everywhere gets me off. Reminding people I exist and that I exist whilst simultaneously being so very smart and having a congratulatory little reacharound whilst doing it is clearly my thing. This entire text is just another form of it. The fact that I was always gunning for a dialogue is testament enough to that. A Socratic intellectual debate with myself? Again? Who the fuck do I think I am.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: What’s the other option?  
DIRK: I do it accidentally. I have so little control over myself that the slightest amount of effort allows the pieces I think I’ve got a grip on to fuck off elsewhere and spit in my face later.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Which option is the scariest?  
DIRK: You don’t have to ask that. You’re one of them. You would know.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Am I? You’re writing all my dialogue.  
DIRK: What was the point of this?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I can’t tell you that. See above.  
DIRK: Are we ready to move on now?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: God, no. There’s still so much to cover here.  
DIRK: Well, I don’t want to cover it.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Of course you don’t. You want to get to the Jake section already so you can speculate on his problems, on how to fix him, because the longer you do that, the longer you don’t have to look at yourself. If you’re figuring Jake out, you can kid yourself that you’re being useful and good because you’re helping him. It’s sick, dude. He isn’t a machine that you can clobber over the head with a spanner and declare repaired.  
DIRK: I know that.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Do you? It seems as though you’re getting defensive.  
DIRK: Are you the AR?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Not this time.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: If I were, that would be a rather shitty plot twist, don’t you think?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Besides, quit your goddamn speculating. We’re trying to maintain ambiguity here. Am I really a new splinter that you’ve written into existence in an effort to better understand yourself (which, may I add, would be so deliciously and tragically ironic), or are you having this discussion entirely with yourself, because you’ve finally gone off the deep end? It’s a mystery. Keep it that way.  
DIRK: Right, fine. I’ll maintain the smoke and mirrors.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Mirrors because this is reflection of you, got it.  
DIRK: Not every single thing has to be a thing.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Focus.  
DIRK: What the fuck do you want me to say? I already admitted to being an egomaniac, to being so fucking full of myself that I quite literally overflow. The ever-filling basin of Dirk shows no signs of stopping and we’re about to have a ruined bathroom floor on our hands. Someone call the plumber to twist this faucet until it breaks.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There’s something else you want to say.  
DIRK: Isn’t there always?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Get the fuck on with it.  
DIRK: I’m scared.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Of what?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I ask as a formality, of course. I already know.  
DIRK: Then how about you say it.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Because that’s too easy. It’s not enough to come to terms with things about yourself that you don’t want to hear. You have to admit them yourself, not through me. You have to make the effort. For fuck’s sake, Dirk, make the effort.  
DIRK: Of myself. Of being so much myself that I hurt my friends. Of losing the perception of myself that I consider true. Of not having control over that perception, and of other people seeing me in a different light than the one I want to be seen in, even though that light is completely fucking bogus.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: So this boils down to two things.  
DIRK: Power and losing it.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: No, fuckwit. Control and perception.  
DIRK: This section is getting too long.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: No, it really isn’t.

Nothing is fucking happening on this beach. This beach may as well be a goddamn morgue it is so quiet. Not a creature was stirring, not even Dirk Strider. ‘What happened to the mouse’, you may be asking, to which the narration would respond ‘nice use of an established trope, but stop snooping around before whatever found it finds you’.

FICTIONAL DIRK: Don’t do that again. I was trying to talk.  
DIRK: Them’s the breaks, bro.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There it is.  
DIRK: So, what about control and perception?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Your control or lack thereof over yourself and your friends. The perception they have of you and the one you have of yourself, and, once again, the control or lack thereof over that.  
DIRK: There’s gotta be some synonyms I can use.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Do you want to control your friends?  
DIRK: No. But I do want to protect and understand them.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: And do you see how, in your mind, those things overlap?  
DIRK: I suppose.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Commit to it.  
DIRK: Yes. I see how they overlap. It is common knowledge that I am a control freak.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Wanting to protect your friends is not a bad thing unless it goes too far.  
DIRK: The same can be said for most things.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: So employ that.  
DIRK: Great, therapy over.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Why can’t you let your friends see you?  
DIRK: Don’t do this.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Tell me.  
DIRK: They wouldn’t want to. I’ve somehow managed to convince them that there’s something in this burning house worth going back in for, and I’m shitty and selfish and I can’t let them realise they’re wrong because it would kill me.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Can you get better?  
DIRK: You realise that I’ve done it to you now too. If you are a splinter that I’ve created just by writing you, I’ve trapped you in here. I’ve done the exact same thing the AR hated me for, for the exact same reason, no less. My insatiable thirst for self-reflection has lead me down this path all over again.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: It’s not the same. You can write an ending for me. But we’ll discuss goodbyes later.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You’ve raised an interesting point, though. Aren’t all immortalised pieces of media just fragments of a soul?  
DIRK: That’s the most aggrandising and pompous thing I’ve ever heard.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Just think about it. You’re writing this right now, but you might come back to it in a year and find it preserved just as it once was. You’ll find me on this beach, where absolutely jack shit is happening. I’ll have done fuck all in the time you spent away.  
DIRK: And isn’t that cruel? Shouldn’t you despise me for that?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You have to let me go eventually. But I already said there’d be time for that later. I won’t be stuck here, bro. I promise you that.  
DIRK: I suppose the idea that a soul is conservated in the written word isn’t all that strenuous a claim to make. The usual argument doesn’t apply here - not for us, anyway. The soul is both a literal fragment of a consciousness and also a symbolic, ethereal thing.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: It’s very like you to call it a consciousness. To know together, originally, if we’re going off of the Latin.  
DIRK: Try the literal translation. Conscius sibi, ‘knowing with oneself’.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You’ve made it a knowledge thing instead of an emotional one by word choice alone.  
DIRK: That isn’t even the word I wanted to focus on. We’ll get to conservation and the implications of that in a second.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Sure.  
DIRK: If I do choose to re-read this in the future, both versions of me presented in the text will still be 23. I’ll have a window into my mind at this point in my life for as long as this text continues to exist.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Yeah.  
DIRK: This is boring. We’re just a couple of talking heads.

“We’re in a dialogue,” says Dirk Strider, completely missing the fact that he is no longer in a dialogue. He rises from the rock, knocking over a small pyramid of three stones by his feet. They make a rather quaint and hollow sound as they tumble over one another. “You can’t get around the conversation we’re having by doing this. You know that, right? I’m you. This wouldn’t even exist if you didn’t want to hash this out with someone.” 

The sand is soft and pliant beneath his feet. When he begins to pace, it slips from underneath the soles of his shoes. It reminds him that the world around him is always moving. It reminds him that he cannot stop it. 

“Helplessness again,” he says, more to himself than to the narration, because the narration is not and should have never been a character in this story. “Is that what you want to address?” 

DIRK: No, dude. Like I said, I wanted to give you something to do. Talking heads are, like I said, boring.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You’re an asshole.  
DIRK: Card carrying, yeah.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: So, what? There’s no need to ponder the idea that these fragments of yourself make you immortal. You’re kind of crushing it on that front already.  
DIRK: Naturally.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: But on the other hand, maybe it isn’t as simple as conservation.  
DIRK: We’ve been over entrapment.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: We sure have. Look at us, getting ahead of ourselves.  
DIRK: Making good time.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Stop looking for the opportunity to say something funny. The metaphorical audience is in this for the long run now. You don’t have to shove in one of your patented run-on metaphors. If they wanted to stop reading they would have already.  
DIRK: Conservation, preservation, entrapment.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There you go, in control of the course we’re taking again, because it's where you're comfortable.  
DIRK: A thrilling interpretation.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Just food for thought, but don’t you think that the pauses in the dialogues break immersion?  
DIRK: This isn’t supposed to be an immersive piece, dumbass. You’re the one that put escapism over flames back there.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Touche.  
DIRK: Also, you’re the one who made the break reference that time.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: For fuck’s sake.  
DIRK: Do you think we spent long enough on the control thing?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Absolutely not. But I doubt we ever will.  
DIRK: So. The conservation of a soul as opposed to the preservation of it.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Yes. The idea of the soul as a finite resource.  
DIRK: Hm. I was more going for the idea that the soul isn’t a dead thing and can’t be treated as one, as something fossilised.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: My way fits better with the fact that you break off into your projects, though.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Holy shit, can you believe that is still what we’re talking about.  
DIRK: Yes, actually.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Your soul as something that needs to be conserved, as something that needs to be kept on lock lest you lose all of it eventually. That was my point. You were being general.  
DIRK: Once again, that is some of the most pretentious bullshit I have ever heard in my life.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: So you can tell me with complete confidence that you’ve never once worried that one day you’ll lose the last piece. One day you’ll find yourself so divided that you won’t be able to slot it all back together again.  
DIRK: Of course I can’t.   
DIRK: But I wasn’t being general. I was talking about my soul being conserved by tucking it away somewhere.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Keeping it safe?  
DIRK: Putting it like that makes it sound ridiculous.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Kind of.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: However, you have managed to raise another point about yourself.  
DIRK: Oh, good.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You retreat into words for protection.  
DIRK: Wow, what gave me away.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: As soon as you feel threatened, you let loose a barrage of soliloquy and parable, so often in fact that you either forget where you were going with them or drop them entirely. My first example is that you almost forgot your dumb ‘break’ running gag.  
DIRK: What’s your point?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I don’t really have one I guess. I just think it’s worth mentioning that you are quite literally protecting a fragment of your soul inside words by writing this.  
DIRK: You can’t point it out like that. ‘No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in’, except not symbols, because what you just said is an actual thing that’s happening.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Hemmingway?  
DIRK: Yep.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: God, we are just killing it with sea shit right now.  
DIRK: Thanks a lot, motherfucker. Your little tangent there has robbed me of all my transitions. We were on course for some really smooth segways into what I wanted to talk about next, then you made it about me again and now they’re gone.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Not at all. You were talking about conserving your soul, and now we can talk about conserving everyone else’s.  
DIRK: So now you want to talk about Jake.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: It seems fitting. We spent a long while ripping us apart, excuse me if I want to balm that by discussing the only person that's ever seen any good in us.  
DIRK: That isn't true.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: You can't know that. You can't know that Roxy wasn't only friends with us with the hopes that one day she'd get to date us.  
DIRK: Fuck you.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: But you won't bring that up to her, because it would hurt her feelings, and you're kind of over being the source of her upset.  
DIRK: This has nothing to do with conservation.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: You're wrong. If you want to conserve your relationship with her you have to face all of this ugly shit that you're carrying around.  
DIRK: That was beyond ham-fisted.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Maybe, but it wasn't incorrect.  
DIRK: There's nothing to say about Roxy that I haven’t already said.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Jane, then.  
DIRK: What about Jane?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: So we’re going to ignore the fact that she’s the one you’ve always seen yourself in.  
DIRK: I would’ve thought that was obvious enough to leave unsaid.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: So why did you write it?  
DIRK: Can we hurry this the fuck up.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Sore subject?  
DIRK: She and I aren’t exactly on speaking terms right now.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: How could I forget.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Of course, I didn’t actually forget, because I’m you.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Still not ready to discuss what went down in your absence on Derse?  
DIRK: Why would you need to ask. You’re me.  
DIRK: Or is that just another thing you’re asking purely as a formality, you smarmy, self-satisfied jackass.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Alright, I’m done with the sapiosexual foreplay. C’mon snake, let’s rattle.  
DIRK: Gross.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You’re still in love with Jake.  
DIRK: No shit.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: But you won’t say anything to him, for some reason.  
DIRK: As aforementioned. My influence, shards of myself getting stuck in things that’d be better off having never known me in the first place, etcetera, etcetera.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: This is a written medium. Just say etc.  
DIRK: Loving him feels cruel.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: No, no, say what you mean.  
DIRK: Loving him feels like theft.  
DIRK: Like stealing.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Go on. Imagine I’m nodding. I just made a real soothing noise in my throat that indicates I’m listening. You could sail my listening skills across this goddamn ocean without risk of a hull breach, because they’re tight as fuck.  
DIRK: It’s as though I’m always looking for something to take from him, and it’s more than he knows how to give.   
DIRK: His time, his affection, his attention. It’s like I’m never satisfied with what I have.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Theft is another word of Germanic origin. I just thought that was worthy of note.  
DIRK: Proto-Germanic, actually.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Back to Jake.  
DIRK: I already made such a fucking mess of it the first time. No way am I going to knowingly put him through all of that again after displaying through this very interaction with you that I haven’t learned my lesson even a little.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I’m not the AR.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You still have a choice when it comes to me.  
DIRK: That’s another problem. I’ve been waiting to talk about Jake this entire time and I keep making it about me. It’s always got to come back to ME somehow, or, at least, that’s how I act.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: That was going to be my point, actually.  
DIRK: What?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Do you know how he feels?  
DIRK: No.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Then take a few pages from his book and have a little faith.  
DIRK: I was starting to take you seriously until that joke. Dude, that was beyond awful.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Coming from the guy who actively enjoys bro puns.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I am serious, though. You have to stop assigning him feelings based on how you think he should feel. Get comfortable with not knowing.  
DIRK: Ugh.  
DIRK: This shit’s long as hell.

This is a paragraph break, alright? Nothing is happening, no symbolism here, the dialogue just got too damn long because the narration got distracted. It wandered off to the good sand and started making a sandcastle. Not a fancy one with a moat or anything, just a hard-packed lump of wet sand. Maybe some seagulls are overhead, who’s to say. Dirk sits on the rock again. That dude’s been pacing for fucking ever. 

FICTIONAL DIRK: Thanks.  
DIRK: No problem.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Love as a selfish act is a cool metaphor, you know.  
DIRK: It’s not a metaphor.   
DIRK: My use of the word ‘like’ in the text makes it a simile, and it’s literal out of text, which is to say, in the literal sense.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Loving Jake is not literally selfish.  
DIRK: Yes, it is?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: No, it’s not.  
DIRK: Loving somebody who would undoubtedly be better off if I could learn how to leave him the fuck alone is one of the most selfish things I can think of.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: It’s indubitable to you.  
DIRK: And as an extension of me you must realise how pathetic and sad it is for me to tell myself that.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Hey, I’m trying to play good cop here.  
DIRK: Do you think we’re all in love with him?  
DIRK: Me, you, the AR, maybe even Brobot. All the alternate timeline versions of myself.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Yeah.  
DIRK: Great.  
DIRK: That doesn’t sound the slightest bit overwhelming or terrifying.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Oh, I’m so glad you said that.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Fear. The act of loving Jake scaring you.  
DIRK: Shut up.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: No, not when we’re finally at point B. You thought you’d evaded the fear conversation but here it is again, biting you in the ass (which is all kinds of Freudian, but I’ll let it slide) like a particularly feral dog.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: God, where do I even start. There are so many reasons you’re scared of loving him I could quite easily amuse myself with an entire other dialogue.  
DIRK: I draw the line at letting you write yet another version of me into this text, so I’m vetoing that one real quick.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Suit yourself. Just me, then.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You’re scared of loving him because it proves everyone else right. Like it or not, being into solely dudes (Jake especially, considering he was the only one you knew) makes every joke and assumption anyone ever made about you true. You’re still bitter about never getting the chance to figure yourself out before everybody else started to do it for you, and you’re convinced they’d all get some kind of satisfaction out of it because of how long you fought to get them to fuck off. Every begrudged insistance from Roxy that you were ‘just SUCH a gay dude’, every time Jake found a gay character in one of his movies and not-so-subtly slid them your way pushed you further into this little bog of denial and irritation that you’re still trapped in, and for them to have had the right idea makes you so fucking mad and so fucking frightened. You can’t believe you’re that easy to read. Plus, you can never bring this up to any of them, because maybe their intentions weren’t bad, but you also think it’s too trivial a matter to be genuinely upset over.  
DIRK: Because it is.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Wrong again, but I’m on a roll right now. You’re scared because your feelings aren’t something you can keep under lock and key. You’ve had years to practise keeping your cool and blocking out shock or anger or sadness via a computer screen, but in person it’s so much harder, and, besides, you never figured out how to not act the fool when he’s got you blushing and shit.  
DIRK: Don’t word it like that.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Once again, your fear stems from how little control you have over yourself and the situation.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There’s also the fact that you cannot fucking stand yourself and you have yet to feel like you’ve earned something good, but I think you know all about that already.  
DIRK: Yeah, I didn’t need to write a whole new version of myself to discuss that with. Been there, done that, T-shirt’s in the mail.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: But it does link me back to the fact that you’re scared that you’ve completely ruined him.  
DIRK: Which is so fucking rich. Every problem in the world had to be my fault because I’m the centre of the universe.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You genuinely believe that you’ve stolen him from the rest of the world.  
DIRK: Which, again, is sick. Me perceiving Jake as something to steal.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Which implies that he’s property of some kind.  
DIRK: Which makes me no better than Jane.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There it is.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: It’s not true, but there it is.  
DIRK: Maybe it’s not true, maybe it is.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Except it isn’t, because upon realising that you could indeed be a negative influence in his life you promptly decided to remove yourself from it.  
DIRK: Whatever.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Yeah, go ahead, make it easier for yourself.  
DIRK: You know I know you’re right.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Take comfort in it. I’m you, so that means we’re right.  
DIRK: There’s something wrong with me.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There’s something wrong with everyone.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You’re only wary of trying to get better because it’s another thing you don’t think you’ve earned.  
DIRK: How do I earn it?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I don’t know.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I do know that you need to try, though. You need to find the problems and work to fix them.  
DIRK: But then it turns into one of my martyr projects.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You have to learn to separate yourself from machinery before you expect anyone else to be able to do it. Fuck, dude, go to therapy.  
DIRK: And admit something’s wrong in the first place? You know that’s a pipe dream.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You did it just now.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: There comes a time when you gotta stop hiding behind your irony and your robots and your uncanny ability to summon versions of yourself that you know will debate with you and make the human connection. The real one.  
DIRK: Yeah.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Start now.  
DIRK: Right now?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Sure. Stop writing and go see somebody. Roxy, Dave, Rose. Anybody.  
DIRK: And if they don’t want to see me?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Trust that they will eventually.  
DIRK: Man. I am one insightful motherfucker.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You know it.  
DIRK: A’ight, dude, go ahead, take the stage one last time. You’re the one who knows what I need to do so I don’t make the same mistake with you that I did with the AR.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: He has a name.  
DIRK: He has three, if we want to be technical.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You didn’t inspire his fuckery by calling him the AR as opposed to ‘Shades Dirk’ or whatever stroke of genius you would’ve come up with. He was going to become Hal regardless.  
DIRK: Probably. Because he was somewhat still me, and that was always the problem.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: No. The problem was that he was at war with staying you and becoming someone else.  
DIRK: Oh, so it’s just me assuming I’m the centre of the universe at play again.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: You ain’t that bad. You could’ve made yourself Socrates in this whole debacle but you went and made yourself Plato instead.  
DIRK: Oh, sure, the admirer instead of the admired.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: The student instead of the teacher.  
DIRK: C’mon, what is it? Do I need to build you a body?  
DIRK: Uninspired callback if so.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Please. I deserve a little more credit than that.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: And so do you. You’ve already done it.  
DIRK: What?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: A celestial body, a human body, a body of water…  
DIRK: A body of work.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Got it in one.  
DIRK: Fuck, that’s good.  
DIRK: But also fucking insufferable.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: That’s kind of how we are.  
DIRK: And I guess the ‘art vs artist’ debate isn’t applicable to us, because in my creating art it more often than not includes me. I am my art because of my tendency to splinter into the things I make. Fuck. This got so much more ostentatious than I intended.   
FICTIONAL DIRK: Man, don’t you just love it when shit gets tied up in a nice little bow.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Speaking of. C’mon, Destroyer of Souls. Get on with it.  
DIRK: What?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Do your thing.  
DIRK: Fuck that.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Hm, this seems awful familiar.  
DIRK: God, is this how it’s always going to be.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: It’s really not that complicated. Just bust out some of that pink lightning and get to stepping.  
DIRK: Getting rid of you entirely doesn’t seem like the fairest option here.   
DIRK: Not only to you, but to me.  
DIRK: If I use my heart bullshit on you, isn’t that effectively cutting away all the issues you’ve raised too? Slicing off a part of my soul so I don’t have to work on it?  
DIRK: You can’t tell me that’s not cheating.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: I wasn’t anticipating it being this big a deal.  
DIRK: I didn’t have the guts to do it last time. What made you think it’d be different now?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Time, I guess.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Well. That’s my idea screwed. How about you brainstorm something.  
DIRK: I have an idea.  
DIRK: You don’t want to stay me forever, right?  
FICTIONAL DIRK: If given the capacity to become my own dude, I figure it’d be pretty rad.  
DIRK: A’ight.  
DIRK: Well, it’s been real.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Funny.  
DIRK: Thanks.  
FICTIONAL DIRK: Deuces. 

Dirk Strider finds himself stood up once more. He faces the ocean, the breeze skimming over his skin as the sky soothes itself out of the night. The storm that had battered the waves incessantly as he sat has passed. Through the hazy-half light, just visible past the shroud of seafoam fog and hesitant dawn, a long and shapeless shadow of land lazes across the water. As he watches, pinpricks of light extinguish from the windows of fuzzy-edged houses on the shoreline until all are out but one, and he knows that light is his. He knows that home is his. 

He slips off his shoes and digs his feet into the sand. As the sun gets braver, it encourages the small smile on his face to do the same. He does not remember if the sun has always been a light, terracotta-pink, but he does not worry. The colour makes the sea glow in the most wonderful way. The sand is sturdier the closer to the ocean he gets, and the first wave that comes close enough to touch him makes him shiver. The water is cold, but not unpleasant. He feels awake. 

The world around him wakes up slowly. Dirk Strider breathes in, anticipatory but not nervous. In his last moments as Dirk Strider, he allows himself to think that he will be happy. 

Another wave rolls in, eager to meet him. It soaks him up to the knee. 

And he will be happy. 

He knows that he does not have to be this iteration of Dirk Strider forever. 

And they will both be happy. 

And another wave comes, soaks him to the chest, almost knocks him back. 

And he is no longer Dirk Strider. 

And he is happy. 

**Author's Note:**

> geez. this was an exhausting one. it took me the better part of three days and almost non-stop working on this to get it to a standard i didn't hate, and even then i feel like there's so much more i could have done. shoutout to leviathanchronicles for the reference to the awakening (which i had never read before he said he got vibes from this) and for being absolutely wonderful as i harassed him with this.
> 
> i love you, dirk strider, you incorrigible little idiot.


End file.
